Public Lectures: Curating for Social Change

The Zurich University of the Arts is launching together with Bootes the Diploma of Advanced Studies ‘Executive Education on Global Culture’ in Hong Kong this March 2017 with the first 5-days course focussing on Curating and Social Change.
In the evenings public talks will be held by Hong Kong artists and curators Yang Yeung, Kacey Wong, Michael Leung, Bo Zheng, Clara Cheung and wen yau in conversation with Dorothée Richter.
 
Dates: 27 – 30 March 2017
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Connecting Space Hong Kong
 

Curating Resistance

Public lecture by Kacey Wong
Date: 27 March, 7pm

In front of social injustice and political suppression, art curatorship can become a powerful tool to generate public awareness and motivate citizens to participate into civic actions. By strategically identifying issue, selecting venue, choosing artists, and designing audience participation, etc. The invisible curator creates a safe platform for the public to ‘plug-in’ comfortably in the quest for justice, democracy, and freedom.

Towards an Ecological Commons

Public lecture by Michael Leung
Date: 28 March, 7pm

Like in many places around the world, Hong Kong’s sociopolitical terrain allows privatisation, developer hegemony and neoliberal capitalism to thrive relentlessly – in its process rezoning valuable agricultural land and eroding communities. The presentation will share creative strategies that encourage participation, self-reflection and social change in reactivating our ecological commons – environmental heterotopias formed by insurrectionary experiences, a total view and empowered communities. Towards an Ecological Commons will also illustrate relations between non-profit art spaces, guerrilla farms, art zines and civil disobedience.

Curating for Soundpocket

Public lecture by Yang Yeung
Date: 29 March, 7pm

Curating, for soundpocket, is to care for. In the earlier phase of our work, our goal was to inspire artists to first, listen, and then try working with sound in art and sound as art. More recently, we have been giving more attention to helping artists bring out an inner authority from their choice of sound as concept and material in their practice.

 

SEACHINA.NET Digital Archiving and Online Teaching of Chinese Socially Engaged Art

Public lecture by Bo Zheng
Date: 30 March, 7pm

Dr. Zheng will share his experience in leading a major project to build a digital archive of Chinese socially engaged art and a MOOC on this topic. Because there is little institutional support for socially engaged art in China, and because socially engaged art is often immaterial and cannot circulate in the art market, it has been difficult for students and the public to see previous practices and to learn from them. Online platforms provide a solution with several advantages. Dr. Zheng will discuss the curatorial, archiving, and pedagogical strategies that his team has employed in building seachina.net.

A Venture into the crossings of the arts and civil society

Public lecture by Clara Cheung and wen yau
Date: 31 March, 7pmsClara and wen yau will probe into the role of art practitioners in a civil society, by presenting their case studies on art projects that map alternative models of urban life and production and artists’ performative interventions in political arena, and examples of civic engagement within local art community. The inquiries lead to their recent collaboration in creating a platform for critical discourse and creative dialogues on Hong Kong and its cultural landscape, venturing into the crossings of the arts and the civil society.